Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/84

Rh Angevin King, of his son, grandson, and great-grand&shy;son.

The plan I follow is this. I shall first give specimens of prose and poetry written within the Mercian Dane&shy;lagh and East Anglia, where our classic New English was born.

To each specimen I shall add a contrast, being some poem or treatise, written outside the aforesaid district, either in the South, the West, or the North. The samples from within the Danelagh, and from its Essex and Yorkshire border, will be seen boldly to foreshadow what is to come; the samples from shires lying to the South and West of the Danelagh will show tokens of a fond lingering love for what is byegone. In the Midland district I have named, there was the same mingling of Angles and Danes that we find in the shires where the Northumbrian Gospels were translated.

THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.

(About 1120.)

Of all cities, none has better earned the homage of the English patriot, the English scholar, and the English architect, than Peterborough. Her Abbot was brought home, sick unto death, from the field of Hastings; her monks were among the first English&shy;men who came under the Conqueror's frown. Her Minster suffered more from Hereward and his Norse friends than from her new French Abbot, Turold. At Peterborough our history was compiled, not in Latin but in English; the English that had grown up from